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Little Dragon’s Newest Album Machine Dreams offers more pop songs of the less-is-more sensibility. Little Dragon sound like they’re playing in your attic because of the near absence of fuzz and reverb and other studio tricks.

“Little Dragon”, the band’s 2007 debut album, was a Swedish iteration of American R&B and soul rendered by the synth machine, with some introspection shaved off Joy Division. Machine Dreams bares less soul, but ups the BPM a tad, letting loose the synth histrionics, with experimentalism that runs kinks into Depeche Mode.

Like a fine wine, much of Machine Dreams’s complexity comes fully fledged only when savoured on repeat listens. Machine Dreams is an exercise in scoping out the frontiers of avant-garde electronic pop not seen since the early ‘80s.